“Just promise you’ll come back if this doesn’t work,” Nin said.

“Of course,” I said, still holding her. And we stood there in the light of the kitchen while upstairs our parents talked, our whole family together beneath the same roof again.

II.

Life began to move quickly after I returned to Boulder. I went back to my job, worked on clients’ websites, and called Dad daily, but he was always anxious to get off the phone. “One sec, your mom’s calling me,” he’d say. Then, “Gotta go—call you back later,” and I wouldn’t hear from him until I called again.

Whenever I did get to speak to him for more than a couple minutes, he sounded happy. He was busy with things around the house; he’d joined a Nostalgia bowling league and every week he and a group of other widowed men bowled together with their dead wives. Mom was busy getting all her online Christmas cards in order, and Dad was about to get started on redoing the roof of the garage.

“Mom’s really good?” I asked.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “I can’t thank you girls enough. It’s good to have her company. And there’s a lot I never knew about her!”

“Oh?” I said, worried. “Like what?”

“She’s funny. Not that she wasn’t before—but it’s like … well … she’s just being more of herself around me.”

“Wasn’t she always herself?”

“Not like this. She’s different but in a good way,” he said. “And what spunk! That’s her now.” He had to get off the phone, they were about to go ice skating.

All this I took as a good sign. Nin texted to say she’d visited and Dad was doing fine. There were no more episodes of finding him frozen with grief, and soon things felt like how they’d been before Mom’s death, all of us busy with our lives. We had our first snowstorm, the kids got the flu, and Nin called to say she’d gotten the journals back from Nostalgia—everything was safe in the trunk.

“Did you read them?” I asked.

“Um, I’m cool without knowing about Mom and Dad’s sex life.”

“What about those other guys in her folders—did you open those?”

“Seriously, Leah, do you really want to know if Mom was having an affair with a guy named Desert Dog?”

“No,” I said, though the list gnawed at me. Nin and I had explored her Alcohol & Drugs folder. Apparently, in her youth Mom had smoked a lot of hash in Europe, drunk tequila with a ranchero in Mexico, and regularly smoked cigarettes. Nin and I quizzed Dad about it. Was he sure Mom had never smoked? Never, he told us. Never drunk bourbon? He laughed. All Mom ever had was an occasional glass of white wine, he insisted.